We Miss You, Carl Sagan

It is hard to believe that Carl Sagan has been gone now for 20 years. In fact, he died on this day in 1996 of myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 62. He was one of the 20th century’s truly great science popularizers. In addition to writing or co-writing fifteen books, his 1980 PBS television series Cosmos remains the gold standard against which all other astronomy documentaries will be judged.

Here is a listing of Carl Sagan’s books published during his lifetime:

Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966; revised and expanded edition of Iosif Shklovsky’s 1962 book of the same name)

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)

Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978; with others)

Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979)

Cosmos (1980)

Contact (1985)

Comet (1985; with Ann Druyan)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are (1993; with Ann Druyan)

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (written 1996, published posthumously in 1997)

Carl Sagan’s final interview was with Charlie Rose on May 27, 1996, less than seven months before his death. You can see it here.

Carl’s daughter, Sasha Sagan, wrote a loving and thoughtful essay in 2014, the 80th anniversary year of his birth.

Here, now, are just a few of Carl Sagan’s most memorable quotes.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

One of the criteria for national leadership should be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.